Reunion
by Lirillith
Summary: A collection of unrelated drabbles and short fics. Cloud, Tifa, Reeve and Elena seem to dominate at the moment.
1. Chapter 1

Author's note: The main title is borrowed from a game soundtrack and has nothing to do with anything, but since these have nothing to do with each other, it seemed as good a title as any.

These are all drabbles - a hundred words on the dot, at least according the count in WordPerfect - mostly written for challenges at the Livejournal communities game100 or 15minuteficlets, to give credit where it's due - the ideas were mostly sparked by challenges there.

* * *

_Cloud & Yuffie, and an old joke..._

Bargain

"Hands behind your back," Cloud said.

The naked glee in Yuffie's eyes never flickered. She placed her hands behind her and leaned over the heap of crimson materia until her nose nearly touched one. "You said I was going out with you and Cid, right?"

"That doesn't mean we've gone crazy." He shuffled through the pile, setting several aside.

Her face fell when she saw his choice. "That chocobo-mog thing?"

"You said you'd do _anything_ for a summon. _Any_ summon."

She pouted, but she took the materia. "I was hoping you'd want sexual favors and then you'd let me choose."

* * *

_Reeve & Aerith, well before the game starts_

Sunflowers

Reeve paused a moment on the station steps, looking out over a sea of gray and black and navy umbrellas before unfurling his own.

As he walked, he tried making a to-do list, though of course he'd have a dozen new problems on his desk by the time he got there. He needed coffee, and he had five gil on hand. Needed to get by the bank, too.

Then he spotted the girl on the corner. Her umbrella was leaf-green, and her basket was full of sunflowers. He decided he'd make do with the coffee they'd have at the meeting.

* * *

_Reeve, sometime during the game_

The Road to Hell

They're fighting for what they believe in. And they've killed a lot of innocent people in the process.

According to them, so have we. Sometimes I question their versions of events. I never liked Scarlet, but I can't see her ordering a massacre just for the hell of it. Shinra makes its mark in other ways. I never think of it in terms of right and wrong, just as the way things are. Of course that's not how they see it.

They're trying to do what they see as right. Their intentions are good. You know how the saying goes.

* * *

_Tifa, post-game_

A New Threat

I guess we won. Humanity's still alive, Meteor's gone, and Sephiroth's dead. We did our part to take down Shinra. And now we're left to try to build normal lives and mourn our losses. I tend bar in Costa del Sol. Saving the world feels so distant I might as well have dreamed it.

Sometimes I really do dream, nightmares of some vague new threat, and wake with my heart hammering. But they're just dreams. The dangers the world faces now are much more complicated and much less dramatic. It might be easier if we did have something to fight.

* * *


	2. Chapter 2

Author's note: This was written off a challenge word with a 15-minute time limit, and first posted at a Livejournal community. Needless to say, it's a one-shot.

* * *

Always There

The hardest thing about loss is that it never goes away.

Tifa said that to him, he thinks. It's true. Aerith's death was an agonizing shock, a recurring nightmare, an explosion of grief and pain, but once that was over, once he'd recovered himself and his memories, it wasn't much better.

The edge was less keen than it had been at first. When he woke up in the morning and everything came to him - who he was, where he was, who he was with - the memory that she'd died was a familiar ache rather than a stabbing grief. He'd laugh, joke with his friends, enjoy a beautiful sunrise or a good meal, and it would come to him that he couldn't share it with Aerith. Sometimes it hit him like a blow to the chest, sometimes like a recurring ache.

Missing her was always there, even as he began to realize, with cautious joy, that Tifa was always there, often wordless and always warm and shyly smiling and beautiful and so different from Aerith.

He remembers laughing green eyes, a quick temper and quick forgiveness, delicate hands and an easy smile. Tifa's solid, built like a fighter, possessed of smoldering, lasting grudges, and for her friends a quiet kindness. She's the rock he needs, slower and more serious than her lost friend. He doesn't like to make the comparisons but can't help it; the memory's never gone.

Sometimes he feels he's waking up. He misses her daily, always, and sometimes weeps in private to think that he'll always miss her, that he can never show her the fields carpeted with yellow flowers or the way clouds look below the airship. But he tries not to show it to Tifa when he turns to her, points the fields out to her and touches her arm.


	3. Chapter 3

Author's note: Like the previous ficlet, this was written to a time limit, though I revised this one a bit afterwards.

* * *

The Suit

In the years since Meteor, I lost a lot. Almost everything.

So it's a surprise when I find it at the bottom of the box, underneath a stack of blankets; the pants are worn at the cuffs and knees, the jacket in tatters, the tie long since lost, but I still have it. The first suit I bought when I joined the Turks. I remember being all excited and scared to death, and not admitting it to myself because it seemed so unprofessional, and having to check the internet to figure out how to fix the tie, and Reno still adjusted it when I got it to work. Weirdly enough, he was really good at that - tied it perfectly.

It was the one I was wearing the day we went on our last order, though I didn't plan it that way, or realize it till later. Avalanche had reentered Midgar, and we were supposed to kill them, but Shinra was crumbling and the world was about to end, and we'd spent so much time watching them and fighting them and trying to think like they thought so we could get where they were going before they got there, it almost felt like killing people we knew. I guess they felt the same; they didn't want to fight. And neither did Reno and Rude. So we kind of stood there a bit, and then moved on, both groups, almost at once. Then the Kisaragi kid looked back and kind of waved at me, and I sort of waved back, and Cait Sith - Reeve - caught me at it and the cat did this little hopping dance, and I stifled a giggle and turned around, embarrassed and kind of happy all at once, and relieved and sort of let down, because, well, now what?

So that was the suit I wore as we got out of Midgar, and there's the mended tear on the leg where I cut myself on some sharp garbage or something. I remember worrying about tetanus half the way to Kalm, before remembering the world was going to end and I'd die of that well before I could die of lockjaw. And anyway it turned out I was fine, which I know because we lived through the end of the world and came out the other side.

I guess it was sort of anticlimactic, but we were still thinking "Now what?" and we stuck together because what else could we do, really? We ended up in Junon, because Rude knew some people there, but it was all gangs and we were in the Turks because we didn't like life in the Midgar slums, so why live through the apocalypse just to go back to that, only now without air conditioning?

So when we got word Reeve was in Cosmo Canyon, I said we should go, and the guys sort of shrugged, and we pulled all kinds of strings - when I was younger I had no idea pulling strings meant "holding guns to heads" - until we got on a boat out of there, and it took us like half a year to get to Cosmo Canyon and we nearly died several times, or at least I felt like we were going to when we hit all Gongaga in the middle of summer, but eventually we made it.

There was work in Cosmo. Not the kind we were used to, but our resumes didn't matter anymore. Farming, artisan work, things like that - Rude's a really great blacksmith. I've been wearing homespun cotton for the last ten years, and I can't remember when I last saw seams so straight. It's like a relic from an ancient civilization, like it should be in a glass case in a museum, and when will we ever see those again? It's hard to imagine I ever lived that other life.

The blouse got torn up for bandages somewhere along the way. I wish I could remember what happened to the tie.


End file.
